Four years, one country and about thirty people who all knew each other. That is what the phrase second wave is usually taken to mean, and every part of it is either wrong or far too small. The period is longer, the map is wider, the roster runs to well over a hundred bands, and none of the people who made the records used the phrase while they were making them.
This article does one job: it defines the term, sets its edges and says who is inside them. The story of the shop, the basement and the people is told in full in the Oslo years and is not repeated here. What that chapter cannot do, because it is a narrative, is answer the question a reader arrives with, which is what the words actually denote and whether a given record is one of them.
The short definition
Second wave black metal is the body of work made from roughly 1991 to 1996 by a generation that inherited a name, a subject and a wardrobe from the founders and built, for the first time, a method to go with them. The method has four load bearing parts: rhythm guitar played as continuous tremolo picking rather than as struck chords, the blast beat used as a floor under whole songs instead of as a climax, a vocal pitched high and torn rather than shouted low, and a recorded sound stripped of its bottom register on purpose and defended in interviews as a position rather than excused as a budget.
Nothing in that list is about Norway, church buildings, corpse paint or belief. Those things are historically attached to the term and none of them is part of the definition, which is why so many arguments about who counts go nowhere. A record is second wave if it was made inside the period, by musicians working from that method, whatever country it came from and whatever its makers believed on a Sunday.
A period is not a style and a style is not a creed. The second wave is the first of those three things, and almost every argument about it comes from someone using one of the other two.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
Where it starts and where it stops
The edges are where the term earns or loses its usefulness, and there are four serious candidates for the opening date and three for the closing one. Set them out and the answer stops being a matter of taste.
| Date | The case for it | The case against it |
|---|---|---|
| August 1987, Deathcrush | The first Norwegian object in the style, and the shriek is already there | The record is a thrash and death hybrid; almost nothing about the method is present |
| December 1990, Master's Hammer record Ritual in Prague | Does most of what the Norwegian albums would do, a year earlier | One band with no scene around it, and no line of influence anyone can trace forward |
| August 1991, Darkthrone in Creative Studios | The month the method was assembled in a room, against the objections of both a bass player and a label | Nobody outside the studio heard the result for six months |
| February 1992, A Blaze in the Northern Sky released | The first date on which a listener anywhere could buy the thing | Dates the movement from a distribution schedule rather than from a decision |
| May 1994, the trial and the last of the backlog | The scene as a working community ends here | The best records of several bands come afterwards, which makes this a legal boundary, not a musical one |
| 1996, ambition and money | Nemesis Divina, Stormblast and the arrival of budgets large enough to change what the records sound like | Raw records carrying every clause of the method were still being made, and still are |
| 1997, the symphonic breakout | Major label distribution, television and orchestras end the underground condition entirely | Treats commerce as the definition, which the method never mentions |
The honest answer is August 1991 to 1996, and the reason is that both ends are musical rather than administrative. The method was assembled in a studio in Kolbotn in the late summer of 1991, when four musicians who could play a great deal better than that deliberately removed everything that made a record sound paid for. It stopped being the default about five years later, not because anyone banned it but because the people who had built it were by then doing other things and the people arriving had budgets.
The wave did not break. It was left standing by everybody who had been riding it.
It was never only Norwegian
The single largest error in circulation is treating the phrase as a synonym for one country. Sweden had Marduk from 1990 and Dissection, whose The Somberlain arrived in 1993. Finland had Beherit, whose Drawing Down the Moon came out the same year, and Impaled Nazarene, who had an album out in 1992. Greece had three bands working simultaneously in Athens, Rotting Christ, Varathron and Necromantia, all with albums in 1993 and a sound built on keyboards and mid tempos that owes the Norwegians nothing at all. France had a closed circle trading cassettes in runs of dozens. Poland, the Czech lands and Japan were all working.
Several of those records predate or run alongside the Norwegian ones, and a few of them satisfy the four clauses more completely. The reason the Norwegian bands own the label is not that they were first or best. It is that they had a shop, a label, a doctrine, a press campaign and, disastrously, a set of court cases, all in the same eighteen months.
Five things the phrase does not mean
- It does not mean Norwegian. The nationality is a historical accident of where the loudest scene sat, and about half the records that satisfy the definition were made elsewhere.
- It does not mean badly recorded. Low fidelity is one clause of four, and several of the defining albums were cut in a fifteen hundred seat concert hall by a professional engineer who worked in the building for twenty four years.
- It does not mean criminal. Perhaps a dozen people out of hundreds were involved in anything a court heard about, and not one of the four musical clauses has anything to say about it.
- It does not mean satanic. The subject matter of the period runs through Norse myth, folklore, winter, medieval history and misanthropy at least as often, and some of the bands were explicit that the imagery was material rather than belief.
- It does not mean the music stopped. Records that satisfy every clause are still being made now. What ended in 1996 was the period, not the method, which is a distinction the phrase is bad at carrying.
What the term is actually good for
It is good for exactly one thing and it does that well: it tells a listener that a record filed under this name will not sound like a record from 1984 filed under the same name, and it gives the difference a date. Used that way it is the most useful piece of vocabulary the genre has. Used as a badge of authenticity, which is how it is normally used, it is worthless, because the criteria that would make it a badge were invented by people who then failed them within five years.
The list of who actually belongs inside those edges, country by country, with the records and the dates, is the Second Wave Bands. The long arc from the goat's skull sleeve of 1982 to the present, of which this period is one chapter and not the whole book, is the overview.
